As the last and biggest project of my college career, I and a team of three other seniors worked to create a fantasy-noir adventure titled One Cold Evening, which we completed over the course of two semesters (fall 2019 and spring 2020). My teammates were two programmers and a 3D generalist artist, while I wore the hats of producer, environment artist, and narrative designer/writer. I knew that it was going to take up a lot of time to manage the team, contribute assets, and write all of the dialog for a narrative-driven game, but I was hopeful that I was up to the challenge.

Producer

Looking back, there are a lot of things that I wish that I had done differently. First and foremost, I found that I had difficulty keeping my team on schedule and was a little too lax when an asset wasn’t completed on time or a feature failed to be implemented. I believe that this was primarily due to a communication failure at the outset of the project. We did not establish at the start of the project what sort of workflows and task breakdowns were most beneficial, particularly in regards to my programmers. That root cause only became clear at the very end of the fall semester, and at that point we were already lagging behind where we wanted to be. After course correcting for spring semester we were able to work much more smoothly, but I still regret the lack of communication at the outset.

Narrative Designer/Writer

My other greatest regret is that I could not spend more time on the narrative design of the game. Due to my responsibilities as producer and environment artist, I constantly found myself having to cut my time working on the narrative of the game short. The result was a plot that was coherent but not particularly complex.

There are parts of the narrative that I am proud of, however. The few characters that we were able to implement were unique and had strong voices, which was something that is particularly important in a mystery. I was also able to gain a greater familiarity with Yarn, including how to integrate it into cutscenes.

Environment/Shader Artist

As an artist, I had two main responsibilities. I created a number of shaders using Unity’s Shader Graph tool that allowed us to more fully realize the wintry forest setting, including a shader that would place a snow texture on upward-facing areas of models and an animated water shader to create a fast flowing river that acts as an obstacle for the player.

While there are many things that I would change about this project if I had the chance to start again, I do think that it was an incredible learning experience. It was my first project as a producer and taught me just how much I had to learn about leading a team. The professors in charge of the class (Kellian Adams Pletcher and Derek Curry) were incredibly helpful in this, offering support outside of class hours and providing me with resources that they had found useful in their own managerial positions. This project also forced me to think about how I write and learn ways to get more work out of a shorter time.

I would like to get the chance to lead a team again in the future. For all the difficulties that producing presented, there was something special about getting to see the project from such a high level perspective and watch as the contributions from all of the team members blended together. I do believe that I would be able to carry the skills that I learned forward into another project. Just hopefully with a little more real world experience under my belt.